Far Country, a — Volume 1 eBook

She could, at times, be surprisingly demure.
These impressions of her daintiness and demureness
are particularly vivid in a picture my memory has
retained of our walking together, unattended, to Susan
Blackwood’s birthday party. She must have
been about twelve years old. It was the first
time I had escorted her or any other girl to a party;
Mrs. Willett had smiled over the proceeding, but Nancy
and I took it most seriously, as symbolic of things
to come. I can see Powell Street, where Nancy
lived, at four o’clock on a mild and cloudy December
afternoon, the decorous, retiring houses, Nancy on
one side of the pavement by the iron fences and I
on the other by the tree boxes. I can’t
remember her dress, only the exquisite sense of her
slimness and daintiness comes back to me, of her dark
hair in a long braid tied with a red ribbon, of her
slender legs clad in black stockings of shining silk.
We felt the occasion to be somehow too significant,
too eloquent for words....

In silence we climbed the flight of stone steps that
led up to the Blackwood mansion, when suddenly the
door was opened, letting out sounds of music and revelry.
Mr. Blackwood’s coloured butler, Ned, beamed
at us hospitably, inviting us to enter the brightness
within. The shades were drawn, the carpets were
covered with festal canvas, the folding doors between
the square rooms were flung back, the prisms of the
big chandeliers flung their light over animated groups
of matrons and children. Mrs. Watling, the mother
of the Watling twins—­too young to be present
was directing with vivacity the game of “King
William was King James’s son,” and Mrs.
McAlery was playing the piano.

“Now
choose you East, now choose you West,
Now
choose the one you love the best!”

Tom Peters, in a velvet suit and consequently very
miserable, refused to embrace Ethel Hollister; while
the scornful Julia lurked in a corner: nothing
would induce her to enter such a foolish game.
I experienced a novel discomfiture when Ralph kissed
Nancy.... Afterwards came the feast, from which
Ham Durrett, in a pink paper cap with streamers, was
at length forcibly removed by his mother. Thus
early did he betray his love for the flesh pots....

It was not until I was sixteen that a player came
and touched the keys of my soul, and it awoke, bewildered,
at these first tender notes. The music quickened,
tripping in ecstasy, to change by subtle phrases into
themes of exquisite suffering hitherto unexperienced.
I knew that I loved Nancy.

With the advent of longer dresses that reached to
her shoe tops a change had come over her. The
tomboy, the willing camp-follower who loved me and
was unashamed, were gone forever, and a mysterious,
transfigured being, neither girl nor woman, had magically
been evolved. Could it be possible that she loved
me still? My complacency had vanished; suddenly
I had become the aggressor, if only I had known how
to “aggress”; but in her presence I was
seized by an accursed shyness that paralyzed my tongue,
and the things I had planned to say were left unuttered.
It was something—­though I did not realize
it—­to be able to feel like that.